


The World Wasn't Ready

by SG39



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, Conspiracy, M/M, Superpowers, Wishes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-07-20
Updated: 2013-07-25
Packaged: 2017-12-20 18:59:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,230
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/890712
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SG39/pseuds/SG39
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Actually getting superpowers had been a bit different from how they imagined it back in those days.<br/>Contrary to how generations of acne-ridden teenagers had always theorized, there was a single, surefire way to get everything you’ve ever wanted, and now the world knew what it was.<br/>All you had to do was make the mistake of wishing for it.<br/>superpowers!johnlock</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Nothing Happens To Me

The EHP - Enhanced Humanoid Phenomenon - happened gradually (and was therefore very poorly documented by the Agency) but John remembered the whole thing gaining traction when he was about six.  


Speculation and superstition started to pop up in papers and 'zines like mushrooms poking their heads out of gaps in the tree trunks. Adults would talk about it nervously at the dinner table, while children whispered to one another on the playground. They giggled about what kind of powers they wanted, and what kind of crazy ways they would get them. 

There was talk of government experiments gone terribly awry. Gifts from gods and angels and aliens. Genetic mutations. Legendary artifacts unearthed. Fusions with animals, insects and even the elements themselves. They passed around comic books, hearts thrumming excitedly at the thought of flight or super-strength. Some of his friends even created traumatic (though typical) origin stories for themselves, and ran around with blanket-capes and paper masks.  


-  


Actually getting superpowers had been a bit different from how they imagined it back in those days.  


Contrary to how generations of acne-ridden teenagers had always theorized, there was a single, surefire way to get everything you’ve ever wanted, and now the world knew what it was.  


All you had to do was make the mistake of wishing for it.  


-  


The interior of the psychologist’s office smothered John's senses with warm feelings. The intended effect was to make the patient more comfortable, but what it actually did was suffocate him. It was like the plush armchairs and emotionally neutral art were trying to manipulate John into feeling safe.  


Well.  


Maybe he was safe.  


“So have you submitted any reports yet?”  


Ugh, not the reports, “Oh, yes. Yes of course, I've-”  


“John”  


Right. Everyone’s a goddamn telepath. He resisted scowling and concentrated on reading her notes upside-down (mostly to spite her for invading his privacy).  


Trust issues. Rich coming from a telepath psychologist. She was a pretty young woman. He wondered what kind of psychotic breakdown triggered her enhancement. It would have to be something positively mad for an ability like telepathy.  


If she was reading his mind again, she didn't say anything. John kept his gaze steady, trying to give off the best well-adjusted look. He tried to communicate with his posture that _yes I'm pretty much better now, it's just that my life is completely over - please sign the Agency's damn psych release forms and let me kill myself in peace_ , “You know I haven’t written any. Why ask?”  


She gave him a reproachful but tight-lipped smile, “John. Not only would it be therapeutic, but as a registered EH you’re required by law to keep a detailed public record of everything that happens to you”.  


You don’t have to have telepathy to know what he was going to say next. John was an unhappy, unemployed, underwhelming, useless invalid of an Enhanced Humanoid who avoided his family and spent all his free time wasting away in a bare-walled bedsit wishing there was something interesting on the Internet. 

John’s life was empty.


	2. Gotten Fat

Even walking the streets of London had turned into an ordeal. 

The John Watson who had once invaded Afghanistan felt far away, as if he had been a character in a dream. Memories from light years away constantly bit and tore at the edges of the current John’s consciousness. 

Hm.

Maybe he _did_ have post traumatic stress disorder. 

John happened to be one of the fortunate - or unfortunate, depending on how you look at it - individuals who had suddenly developed extraordinary powers in the last thirty years, and he had used his abilities extensively in his army career. He could lift a (very) small tank when under stress, and his skin was a pinch tougher than it should have been. When he concentrated hard enough, his eyes gained a sort of hyper sensitivity that helped him understand, as if by instinct, where to put his hands (though by all means, with his medical training he really didn't need to). When John wanted to heal an injury or illness, all he had to do was lay down his hands and he would take any and all ills from the patient into himself. He never developed any wounds - usually the after-effects would manifest as pain that eventually faded. John could take pain. 

In the past it would happen quickly. Efficiently. Automatically.... but as he aged, it seemed to stay longer and longer. Eventually it got to the point where the army couldn't use him anymore, and they sent him back without so much as a ‘thank you sir’. On his last assignment, John had healed a man’s bullet wounds, one in the shoulder and one in the leg. The pain from the shoulder disappeared eventually, but left a scar, which was highly unusual. The leg pain still hadn’t faded. Sometimes John woke up in the middle of the night smelling gunpowder and feeling a phantom bullet tearing through his upper thigh. 

If it wasn’t just the leg causing John's problems now – though surely it contributed, John could tell you that much – it was the futility of it all. He'd led his life as well as he could, did his damnedest trekking down what he thought was the right path, and this was what he had to show for it. The people on the road passed him by, sometimes staring at his cane but otherwise completely unconcerned. Probably eager to go home to their loved ones. What did John have aside from his cane? 

_My feet are taking me to Barts_ , John realized. He'd half a mind to stop, honestly, but all he could do was limp on. Maybe he was desperate to see- 

“John? John Watson!” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, thank you for reading. Please let me know what you thought, or leave me a message if you would be willing to beta...


	3. Chapter 3

Mike Stamford led him into Research Lab A, and with a single glance John was forced to internalize exactly how much the world had changed, leaving him behind. 

Replacing the old Shock Therapy machines were warm incubators backed up against the walls, rocking the culture tubes like infants. Autoclaves and complicated technology John hadn’t seen before lined the walls instead of the various experimental (torture) instruments and tools John remembered. There were Agency logos on some of the more expensive looking things. At least that hadn’t changed. This entire wing had been dedicated to researching the EHP. 

The huge, sterile room looked like a scene straight out of a Hollywood laboratory set - the only things that seemed familiar were the logos, the too-white walls and the blood. Oh the blood. There was just so _much_ of it. 

John doubted there was anything unique about EH blood – or rather he hoped there wasn’t as it was currently running through his own veins – but apparently somebody did, because samples practically filled the room. The plastic test tube stands were pushed up against each other edge to edge, corner to corner on every surface he could see… And there… In the middle of the chaos was a man. 

The tall figure wasn’t wearing a lab coat or any protective gear, but he was huddled over a microscope as if he belonged in the lab. He swapped out a slide dotted with a red blood droplet for another one, completely absorbed in his task. 

For a split-second, John thought he looked like a dark king surrounded by gleaming red gems. 

The king’s eyes flicked over to John for a single, heart-stopping moment, before reoccupying themselves with whatever was in the viewfinder. 

“Mike, can I borrow your phone?” 

John’s pudgy old Uni friend hobbled towards a stool, “And what’s wrong the the land-line?” 

“I prefer to text” 

Mike made a show of patting down his pockets and shrugging, “Sorry, it’s in my coat”. That was a lie. They had just stopped by Mike’s office on the other side of the building, apparently just so the man could deliberately toss his phone into a drawer. 

“Here,” John fished his own out, “Use mine”. 

“Oh. Thank you,” the stranger’s eyes flicked up to John, to Mike, and back to John again. He looked surprised for some reason, but he got up out of his lab stool gracefully and took the phone, giving it a once-over before flipping it open to send his text. He had long, bony fingers to match his body’s almost awkward height. His dark curls were gelled down (John guessed they were a right mess when left free) and fell softly over a pale, severe face. 

“An old friend of mine. John Watson” 

He waited for a the man to produce his own name, but what he got was, “Afghanistan or Iraq?” 

Excuse me? “….Sorry?” 

“Which was it, Afghanistan or Iraq?” the stranger was made to repeat himself. Well now John sounded like a right dolt. Mike smirked. John cast him a wary eye - had Mike spoken to Sherlock about this beforehand? How could he have known they were going to meet today, “Ahm. Afghanistan. How… did you-” but he was already handing the phone back and walking back to his seat. 

“How do you feel about the violin?” 

“Sorry, the violin?” John’s second inquisitive eyeballing attempt went unanswered by Mike, who just looked on as if there were some big joke John was missing otu on. 

“Yes, I sometimes play when I’m thinking. Sometimes I don’t talk for days on end - would that bother you? Potential flatmates should know the worst about each other,” the man gave a bit of a barmy smile, ill suited to his face. He had a strange style of quick, precise speech that forced John to turn over each word in his head before he completely understood. 

“I...” he turned to Mike for help, “You told him about me?” 

“Not a word” 

God damnit not another one, “Then you’re a telepath”. 

“Mmmno,” a curt shake of the head as the man settled his coat around his shoulders and grabbed some documents. 

“Psychic?” 

“Nope,” he was about to walk past John to the door. 

John studied him, but honestly couldn’t get a good read, “Well who said anything about flatmates?” 

The man stopped short, right when they were closest to one another - close enough for John to get lost for a somewhat shameful second in the most striking eyes he’d ever seen, “I did. Told Mike this morning I must be a hard man to find a flatmate for, and now here he is just after lunch with an old friend clearly just home from military service in Afghanistan. Not a difficult leap”. Striking, but a bit of a tosser (though that hadn’t exactly been John’s straightest moment), “How did you know about Afghanistan then?” 

“I’ve got my eye on a nice place in central London. Together we should be able to afford it. We’ll meet there tomorrow evening at seven o’clock” John’s question was deftly ignored. The man’s face lit up a bit as if he’d remembered something, “Sorry, got to dash. Left my riding crop in the mortuary”. John stood there in a haze of confusion for what felt like too-long, but recovered quickly enough to ask, “Is that it? We’ve only just met and we’re gonna go look at a flat?” he didn’t even know what he was doing here. 

“...problem?” 

Where to start? “We don’t know a thing about each other, I don’t know where we’re meeting, I don’t even know your name,” this was ridiculous. It couldn’t be this easy. It wasn’t easy. Nothing was easy. 

The man’s eyes darkened and focused. For some reason, John reflexively grit his teeth like he was about to be hit with something. 

“I know you’re an army doctor and you’ve been invalidated home from Afghanistan, I know you have a unique enhancement related to your profession that you’re trying not to use too much. I know you’ve got a brother who’s worried about you but you won’t go to him for help because you're afraid to see him, and I know that your therapist thinks your limp is a psychosomatic symptom linked to a side effect of your enhancements - quite correctly I’m afraid. That’s enough to be going on with, don’t you think?” he stepped out through the door, but his hand paused on the door’s edge and he popped his head back in, “The name’s Sherlock Holmes and the address is 221b Baker Street”. 

Sherlock Holmes was gone with a wink.


	4. Blog Like Nobody's Reading

There weren’t any actual limitations to enhancements, though it would certainly be a lot simpler if they came with warnings or instruction manuals. _Please use responsibly. Caution when hot. May cause inflated sense of self - if you develop a hero complex or seem more inclined towards crime than usual contact your nearest Agency physician. To not be a menace to society, please refrain from capitalizing on your newfound advantage - the following listed actions are still prohibited even though you have superpowers asshole; murder, larceny, vandalism...._

If only. 

You hear stories about it all the time. EH crime was in a league of it’s own, really. Unusual murders where people spontaneously burst into flames in the middle of the road, or where their organs shrunk to the size of buttons and burst from the pressure. Every so often valuables and cash floated out through the walls of bank safes and disappeared. You even heard about people with enhanced strength going on rampages for no apparent reason - maybe it was like roid-rage. In those instances, everything within their reach was pummeled to ruin. For the humanoids like this - not humans but humanoids because of course having an enhancement obviously meant you were no longer human - John heard there were lock boxes deep within the earth where the Agency “contained” them. John never _did_ see Clara again. 

People could get these extraordinary abilities, but after all, they were just people. It was up to their own moral compasses to decide what to do in the afterwards. Naturally, many people saw these feats, and hoping to fight against them (or wanting to join the party) spent their days willing their own enhancements to appear. Flight, strength, speed, hyper-intelligence, precognition, telekinesis... 

The most ambitious prayed for things like immortality, invulnerability and mind control, but so far (with the EHP having only been around for about 30 years) anyone claiming to have become immortal would have to wait quite a while to have their claim proved (or disproved). The Agency didn’t want waste resources on those types, but still had anyone who came forward register themselves just to be safe. 

When John went to get registered, he did so because he hadn’t had anywhere else to go. Even then, the Agency had a poor reputation, but they’d advertised financial support for any EH that they could use as a “productive booster for the betterment of society”. He paid for a college education by submitting to their experiments and following their orders, but he didn’t walk out without his own fair share of scars. Now he wished he’d just slummed it like a regular bloke - being a registered EH these days was like being a criminal on parole. 

Even if he hadn’t been invalidated from the army, John would be required to attend monthly psychiatric evaluations to make sure he wasn’t about to start terrorizing the countryside. He also had to keep appointments with his case supervisor (his attractive psychiatrist) to discuss updates to his public records. 

The public records were another little annoyance about Agency registration. For the sake of national security, John had been exempt while serving queen and country, but now that he was an ordinary citizen again, John was required to keep a series of reports on his daily life - essentially a blog - on the Agency’s official website. 

Originally, the system was designed as a tool for Human families who wanted to keep a watchful eye on the potentially dangerous Enhanced Humanoids in the neighborhood. It was like EH were registered sex offenders. 

When John was a spry twenty-something, all he’d had to do was mail in his reports. They would then be reviewed, discussed, approved, and filed at a local office where anyone in the neighborhood could read them if they were feeling particularly curious about (or afraid of) that young man who _used to be human_. 

In the early 2000s though, the idea of “blogging” really took off, and the Agency took off with it. They set up a website where EH had to submit their reports as blog posts. This came at a time where traditional comics were going out of fashion (even in geek chic) and somehow, the public started to turn to the firsthand accounts of “Supermen” for more realistic supernatural entertainment. 

Popular blogs contained memoirs of EH with particularly interesting or grotesque powers, and sometimes even vigilantes. There even a few blogs that had made their authors into household names. 

Most notable was probably Henry Knight (a man who had wished for freedom from his anxiety disorder so deeply that he actually developed the ability to fly - quite rare, surprisingly - along with. He now spent his time taking in-flight photographs of his travels and posting them. 

There was also Irene Adler, a mature beauty who came upon the power to seduce anything with a brain... apparently by wishing that someday somebody would somehow finally, truly love her. Ironically she apparently still hadn’t found them, even with her succubus-like enhancement. Now she was living the high life in America and wrote about her escapades (in great detail), gave love & sex advice in the comment fields of her blog, and accompanied nearly every schoolboy in the world to their bedtime fantasies. Somebody mentioned to him in passing once that she ran a private dominatrix business for exclusive clientele. 

John Watson hadn’t been especially active in his blog posts since returning to London. Just little snippets of depressing garbage. Nobody but his case worker, his therapist and his sister followed it regularly anyway, but it was getting to be difficult to think of things to write about. He’d even forced himself to go out with some college rugby boys, just to have something to type. 

But now there might be something to write about. 

“Sherlock Holmes” 

He tried the name out on his tongue. Weird... but not half bad. It really fell off the tongue. _Sherlock Holmes_. He tried searching for it in the Agency’s blog database, and the man himself came up as the only result. 

Well of course he did. How many blokes did you meet named _Sherlock Holmes_ in a regular day. 

Next to his name was the Agency’s registration photograph of him. It was old (they had to be updated at least every five years) but definitely recognizable, and now that John had a second in the seclusion of his own bedroom, he took a closer look. Initially Holmes had reminded him of an overgrown boy, but upon further inspection that was not the case at all. The curvature of his jawline was actually rather sophisticated, and his scanning eyes all the more piercing now that John had the privacy to stare into them unabashed. In the photo, Holmes was skinnier... he had a bit of a hollow, angry aura about him... but still he was good looking. Young. Tall. Interesting. These were things that John Watson no longer had. 

John eventually stopped ogling Holmes’ photograph, and went on to the public record of Sherlock Holmes - _The Science of Deduction._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!!

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for taking a look at this fic.  
> I am currently looking for somebody to beta this work...as I tend to make a lot of mistakes and seem to be unable to detect them myself.  
> Please let me know what you thought.


End file.
